Résultats de "Colum McCann" dans Toutes les catégories

"Apeirogon", n.m. : figure géométrique au nombre infini de côtés. Rami Elhanan est israélien, fils d'un rescapé de la Shoah, ancien soldat de la guerre du Kippour ; Bassam Aramin est palestinien, et n'a connu que la dépossession, la prison et les humiliations. Tous deux ont perdu une fille. Abir avait dix ans, Smadar, treize ans.

" Une plongée vertigineuse dans les racines de la violence et dans les ravages du fanatisme. Et un vibrant plaidoyer pour que subsiste, même dans l'horreur, une part d'humanité. " Le Parisien week-end. Comment rester debout face à la violence, à l'horreur ? Comment regarder dans les yeux celui qui vous a enlevé ce que vous aviez de plus précieux ? Comment pardonner à l'assassin d'un des siens ? Comment garder espoir quand tant d'atrocités sont commises au nom de la religion ? Toutes ces questions qui nous assaillent dans une actualité toujours plus tragique, Colum McCann y a été confronté lors de sa rencontre avec Diane Foley.

Bassam Aramin is Palestinian. Rami Elhanan is Israeli. They inhabit a world of conflict that colors every aspect of their daily lives, from the roads they are allowed to drive on, to the schools their daughters, Abir and Smadar, each attend, to the checkpoints, both physical and emotional, they must negotiate. Their worlds shift irreparably after 10-year-old Abir is killed by a rubber bullet and 13-year-old Smadar becomes the victim of suicide bombers. When Bassam and Rami learn of each other’s stories, they recognize the loss that connects them.

Anthony Fennell, a journalist, is in pursuit of a story buried at the bottom of the sea: the network of tiny fibre-optic tubes that carry the world’s information across the ocean floor - and what happens when they break. So he has travelled to Cape Town to board the George Lecointe, a cable repair vessel captained by Chief of Mission John Conway. Conway is a talented engineer and fearless freediver - and Fennell is quickly captivated by this mysterious, unnerving man and his beautiful partner, Zanele.

Taking his inspiration from biographical facts, novelist Colum McCann tells the erotically charged story of the Russian dancer Rudolf Nureyev through the cast of those who knew him. Spanning four decades and many worlds, from the horrors of the Second World War to the wild abandon of New York in the '80s, Dancer is peopled by a large cast of characters, obscure and famous: doormen and shoemakers, nurses and translators, Margot Fonteyn, Eric Bruhn, and John Lennon.

The novel opens on a battlefield: trudging back from the front through a ravaged and icy wasteland, their horses dying around them, their own hunger rendering them almost savage, the Russian soldiers are exhausted, desperate for food and shelter. They find both, and then music and dance. And there, spinning unafraid among them, dancing for the soldiers and anyone else who'll watch him, is one small pale boy, Rudolf. Rudolf, a prodigy at six years old, who became the greatest dancer of the century, who redefined dance, rewrote his own life and died of AIDS before anyone knew he had it.

New York, August 1974: a man is walking in the sky. Between the newly built Twin Towers, the man twirls through the air. Far below, the lives of complete strangers spin towards each other: Corrigan, a radical Irish monk working in the Bronx; Claire, a delicate Upper East Side housewife reeling from the death of her son; Lara, a drug-addled young artist; Gloria, solid and proud despite decades of hardship; Tillie, a hooker who used to dream of a better life and Jazzlyn, her beautiful daughter raised on promises that reach beyond the skyline of New York.

In the National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann thrilled readers with a marvelous high-wire act of fiction that The New York Times Book Review called "an emotional tour de force". Now McCann demonstrates once again why he is one of the most acclaimed and essential authors of his generation with a soaring novel that spans continents, leaps centuries, and unites a cast of deftly rendered characters, both real and imagined.

It has been eleven years since Diane Foley’s son, the American journalist James Foley, was kidnapped in northern Syria, and nearly ten since that day in August 2014 when she would learn that he had been murdered by ISIS in a public beheading that would ricochet in video around the world. A whole decade. Time rushes past. And yet, for Diane, that moment is unending. In American Mother, legendary author Colum McCann tells Diane’s story as she recalls the months of his captivity, the efforts made to bring him home and the days following his death.

It is a cold day in January when J. Mendelssohn wakes in his Upper East Side apartment. Old and frail, he is entirely reliant on the help of his paid carer, and as he waits for the heating to come on, the clacking of the pipes stirs memories of the past; of his childhood in Lithuania and Dublin, of his distinguished career as a judge, and of his late wife, Eileen. Later he leaves the house to meet his son Elliot for lunch, and when Eliot departs mid-meal, Mendelssohn continues eating alone as the snow falls heavily outside. Moments after he leaves the restaurant, he is attacked.

Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist and playwright, is assigned to cover the underwater cables that carry the world’s information. The sum of human existence—words, images, transactions, memes, voices, viruses—travels through the tiny fiber-optic tubes. But sometimes the tubes break, at an unfathomable depth.

The short fiction of Colum McCann documents a dizzying cast of characters in exile, loss, love, and displacement. There is the worn boxing champion who steals clothes from a New Orleans laundromat, the rumored survivor of Hiroshima who emigrates to the tranquil coast of Western Ireland, the Irishwoman who journeys through America in search of silence and solitude. But what is found in these stories, and discovered by these characters, is the astonishing poetry and peace found in the mundane: a memory, a scent on the wind, the grace in the curve of a street.

In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in bestselling novelist Colum McCann’s stunningly intricate portrait of a city and its people.

In such acclaimed novels as Let the Great World Spin and TransAtlantic, National Book Award-winning author Colum McCann has transfixed listeners with his precision, tenderness, and authority. Now, in his first collection of short fiction in more than a decade, McCann charts the territory of chance and the profound and intimate consequences of even our smallest moments.

From the critically acclaimed Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin, comes a paean to the power of language, and a direct address to the artistic, professional and philosophical concerns that challenge and sometimes torment an author. Comprising fifty-two short prose pieces, Letters to a Young Writer ranges from practical matters of authorship, such as finding an agent, the pros and cons of creative writing degrees and handling bad reviews

2019 geht der Journalist Fennell in Kapstadt an Bord der Georges Lecointe, eines Reparaturschiffs für Kabelbrüche in der Tiefsee. Er soll eine Reportage schreiben, über Kommunikation und ihre Störungen. Im Fokus: die Tiefseekabel, die die globalen Datenflüsse leiten, ständig gefährdet durch Naturereignisse, Krieg und Terrorismus. Der Missionschef Conway scheint nicht glücklich über den Gast, der sich für alles zu interessieren scheint - vielleicht auch für Conways Frau Zanele?

At the turn of the twentieth century, Nathan Walker comes to New York City to take the most dangerous job in the country: digging the tunnel far beneath the Hudson that will carry trains from Brooklyn to Manhattan. In the bowels of the riverbed, the workers—black, white, Irish and Italian—dig together, the darkness erasing all differences. But above ground, the men keep their distance until a dramatic accident on a bitter winter's day welds a bond between Walker and his fellow workers that will both bless and curse three generations.

An ageing nun is tracked to ground by her sister; a garrulous beautician must lay out the corpse of a loved one. These are eloquent tales of exile and displacement, of characters always in search of a way back home or of a way to leave it. Mischievous, assured and versatile, Colum McCann's collection of short stories marks him out as one of our best contemporary writers.

Colum McCann's first novel goes back to the years before the Spanish Civil War, following the adventures of a peripatetic Irish photographer from the war-strewn shores of Europe to the exotic plains of Mexico. The story is told in the words of the photographer's only son, a wanderer himself, who uses his father's unreliable memories and the fading remnants of his art to piece together his family history and explain the mystery surrounding his mother—a Mexican beauty brought back by his father to Ireland.

One powerful novella, with two thematically linked short stories on either side of it, forms the basis of Everything in This Country Must. Although these are stories about Ireland and the Troubles, they have an almost mythical rather than a political feel.